to achieve this. MI6 could not be expected to predict Hitler’s conquests, which dramatically enhanced his access to oil, raw materials and slave labour.
On the military side, neither MI6 nor the service departments learned much about the new technology and tactics being developed by Britain’s enemies. Nor about their limitations: they wildly overrated the Luftwaffe’s ability to devastate Britain’s cities. In 1938, Broadway reported that the Germans had 927 first-line bombers capable of mounting 720 sorties a day and dropping 945 tons of ordnance (this was an exaggeration of 50 per cent), and projections of likely casualties were even more inflated. War Office appreciations of the German army were equally mistaken, especially in estimating its potential mobilised strength. These suggested in 1939 that Hitler was already master of the largest war machine his nation’s resources could bear. Rearmament, coupled with vast public expenditure, ‘had taxed the endurance of the German people and the stability of the economic system to a point where any further effort can only be achieved at the risk of a breakdown of the entire structure’.
A February 1939 Strategical Appreciation by the chiefs of staff, drafted by the Joint Planning Committee, asserted that Britain could survive a long war better than Germany. This was true, but the chiefs said nothing about the danger that it could meanwhile lose a short one. Moreover, they never pressed the cabinet to acknowledge the shocking weakness of Britain’s Far East empire. The three services’ intelligence branches had no contact with each other, and there were no joint staffs.
As for politics, an MI6 officer wrote in a November 1938 report for the Foreign Office: ‘Not even Hitler’s intimates, according to one of them, knows if he would really risk world war.’ A few months later, the service’s credibility was severely injured by its issue of warnings that Germany intended imminently to strike at Western Europe, starting with Holland. Embarrassment was increased by the fact that the Foreign Office forwarded this alarm call to the US government. One of the British recipients, senior civil servant Sir George Mounsey, delivered a blast against MI6 which echoed around Whitehall. The Foreign Office’s standing was damaged, he said, by acting on the basis of ‘a highly sensational and highly disturbing kind of information which [MI6] are unable to guarantee’. Mounsey was dismissive of all covert sources, agents whose rumour-mongering had prompted Broadway’s warning: ‘They have a secret mission and they must justify it … If nothing comes to hand for them to report, they must earn their pay by finding something … Are we going to remain so attached to reliance on secret reports, which tie our hands in all directions?’ Mounsey had his own agenda: to sustain the policy of appeasement adopted by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, whom he admired prodigiously. His views nonetheless reflected a general scepticism in high places about Broadway’s performance.
Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office, often a critic of MI6, on this occasion leapt to its defence. While acknowledging the frustrations of dealing with secret organisations, he said that he could not forget that its officers ‘did warn us of the September [1938 Munich] crisis, and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia, of which our official [diplomatic] reports did not give us much warning’. In December 1938 Broadway offered a sound character sketch of Germany’s Führer, at a time when many British diplomats and politicians still deluded themselves that he was a man they could do business with. ‘Among his characteristics,’ asserted the MI6 report, ‘are fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment, and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision. He has gained the reputation of being always able to choose the right moment and right method for “getting away with it”. In the eyes of his disciples, and increasingly in his own, “the Führer is always right”. He has unbounded self-confidence, which has grown in proportion to the strength of the machine he has created; but it is a self-confidence which has latterly been tempered less than hitherto with patience and restraint.’
It is easy to catalogue the shortcomings of MI6. Like most of its sister services on the Continent, in 1939 it commanded little respect in high places, and had small influence on policy-making. It seems necessary to go beyond this, however, and pose the question: what might its spies have usefully discovered, granted more resources and cleverer people? The likely answer is: not much. MI6’s reporting was matched by a daily bombardment of newspaper headlines, both showing beyond peradventure that Germany was rearming. More accurate and detailed information about Hitler’s armed forces would have been useful to the War Office and Downing Street, but the critical issue, the vital uncertainty, was not that of Germany’s capabilities, but rather that of its intentions.
It seems quite misplaced to blame wrong or inadequate intelligence for the calamitous failure of Britain and France to deal effectively with the Nazis. Both nations correctly assessed the options at Hitler’s disposal for onslaughts East or West. MI6 can scarcely be held responsible for failing to anticipate exactly where or when he would attack, because he himself was an opportunist who reserved his decisions until the last moment. Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote much later: ‘We were daily inundated by all sorts of reports. It just happened that these were correct; we had no means of evaluating their reliability at the time of their receipt. (Nor was there much that we could do about it!)’ Rather than a failure of intelligence, what mattered was the democracies’ failure of will – the refusal to acknowledge that the Nazis constituted an irreconcilable force for evil, which the very survival of European civilisation made it essential to destroy, rather than to bargain with.
Most of Hitler’s opponents inside Germany, and indeed across Europe, were communists who considered the Russians the only people both willing and able to challenge fascism. Everything said and done by the British and French governments before the outbreak of war confirmed anti-Nazis in that view. Thus, people who wished to contribute to undoing Hitler offered information to the agents of Moscow much more readily than to those of London or Paris. It was anti-Nazis’ poor opinion of Neville Chamberlain that made them reluctant to look to his country as a shield against Hitler, not their perception of MI6.
It is far more plausible to argue that Britain’s diplomats should have exposed the dictators’ intentions than to suggest that its spies might have done so. In peacetime, good intelligence officers can assist their governments to grasp the economic, military and technological capabilities of prospective enemies, but it is unusual for a secret service to provide a reliable crib about their intentions. Top diplomats ought to have been cleverer than intelligence officers. Their training, experience and access to sources should have empowered them to assess the world with greater wisdom than Broadway’s old soldiers. It seems far more discreditable that Henderson, Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, was willing for so long to think well of Hitler, than that MI6 with its meagre resources was unable to tell the government what the Führer would do next. If a German anti-Nazi had turned up on Henderson’s embassy doorstep, offering inside information, it is likely that he would have been sent packing.
Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair – ‘C’, as the head of the secret service was always known – died suddenly in November 1939, having occupied his post for sixteen years. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, pressed the claims of the obscure Gerhard Muirhead-Gould, a former naval attaché in Berlin, to succeed him. Instead, however, Sinclair’s deputy, forty-nine-year-old Guards officer Brigadier Stewart Menzies, convinced the Foreign Office and the prime minister that he had been anointed by the dying Sinclair as his rightful successor. He thus inherited a mantle that he was widely considered ill-fitted to wear. The ninth Duke of Buccleuch, who had been Menzies’ fag at Eton, told a friend that ‘C’s’ contemporaries were mystified ‘how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up in such a position’. Hugh Trevor-Roper sneered at Menzies as ‘a thoughtless feudal lord, living comfortably on income produced from the labour of peasants whom he had never seen, working estates which he had never visited’.
This was hyperbolic, as were most of the historian’s private judgements on his colleagues, but it was true that Menzies had learned his craft in a bad school – not so much Eton as service on the staff of Brigadier John Charteris, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s egregious intelligence chief on the Western Front.